RE: [cobalt-users] UK Colocation

[Sales - Way to the Web <sales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Chuck,

> these customers must also understand that constant checking 
> on their part 
> is becoming part of the problem, and that, being the nature of the 
> internet, anything under 800ms is to be considered acceptable... they 
> cannot control their routing to the server.. one time there 
> may be only 5 
> 'hops' while at others there may be 30.. and no one can 
> control the quality 
> or available bandwidth getting there... i may be wrong, and 
> out of line 
> here, but if i was to see my site maintaining under 500ms 
> even during heavy 
> load periods, i would not complain at all:)

I wouldn't accept a ping rate of nearly 1 second! That would mean each and
every packet takes a second to travel between you and your server, that's
atrocious. I don't know if you're in the USA, but here in the UK the
internet backbones are very short and access rates very fast. As I said I
get 28ms access on average to one of my providers, 200-400 is not acceptable
- proof of our customers complaining about stalled email collection, slow
access to sites and continually timed-out FTP sessions is proof to us of
that!

Anyway, Webfusion have *finally* come back to me and admitted to a problem
I've been telling them about for ages. It's odd that when I was reporting
it, they said they knew of no problem and now they say that they've known
about a problem all along and that it will be addressed shortly <sigh>.

Technical problems are one thing - I've been in this business long enough
myself to understand an appreciate those difficulties - but ignoring/fobbing
off/keeping customers in the dark is simply not acceptable in my book.

They have a second and final chance. If their promised solution doesn't
work, we *have* to move otherwise we lose *our* customers.

Regards,
Jonathan Michaelson

Way to the Web Ltd
Commercial CGI Scripting, Web Hosting
http://www.waytotheweb.com